Chance v. Design Part 4 (Evolution)

by George Jelliss ⌂ @, Crewe, Saturday, July 04, 2009, 17:13 (5419 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt/xeno claims: "The problem here is, that to discuss biological systems and probabilities, you and I would have to be on the same page mathematically. That means you'd have to know some dynamics and chaos, and some calculus-based probability." - Sorry Matt, but I'm sure DT and DHW have a sufficient understanding of the gambler's fallacy, and don't need to see it expressed in higher mathematical mandarin. This is just argumentum ad obfuscation. - I looked up "Monte Carlo fallacy" in wikipedia: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy#Non-examples_of_the_fallacy - "There are many scenarios where the gambler's fallacy might superficially seem to apply but does not. When the probability of different events is not independent, the probability of future events can change based on the outcome of past events (see statistical permutation). Formally, the system is said to have memory." - This is certainly the case with evolution of life it is a cumulative matter. - "When the probability of repeated events are not known outcomes may not be equally probable. In the case of coin tossing, as a run of heads gets longer and longer, the likelihood that the coin is biased towards heads increases. If one flips a coin 21 times in a row and obtains 21 heads, one might rationally conclude a high probability of bias towards heads, and hence conclude that future flips of this coin are also highly likely to be heads." - If the elements of life newly evolved on Earth today they would probably not get anywhere because they would be eaten by the existing life forms.

--
GPJ


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum